Friday, 20 December 2013

Of this house I know the backwindowlodges six housesparrows in the bricksUnder the sill, and they are the birdsscour these roofs all winter for warmthOr whatever. Two are arguing nowfor a few inches of position on a cornice.How the mind moves out and lights on thingswhen the I is only a glass for seeing:I stand at the windowSetting down each bird, roof, chimney as the boundaries of the neighborhood they make.I have on an old blue jersey.Every two hours I wipe off my glasses.

11 comments:

I am in full agreement with Hazen's comment and (though this is an obscure way of expressing what I'm thinking) "more." I love the Raworth comic and the poem runic qualities appeal to me very much and feel like the way my mind (for salient example) operates. I hope I've used "runic" correctly. Sometimes I mean "gnomic," but I don't think so here. Curtis

There were entire decades in which it was for whatever obscure reason[s] impossible for me to use the first person pronoun in poetry (or for that matter anywhere else).

But of course that doesn't mean it wasn't lurking silently in there somewhere, unseen yet subtly exerting its unfortunate influence on things.

This curious I-phobia perhaps will seem a bit out-of-step with what was once termed the march of progress, now that self-aggrandizement has become a universal compulsion nay even a necessity (see: the grotesque selfie phenomenon, by which, perhaps, this particular phase in the Decline of the West will be remembered).

Ah well... Authorial subjectivity, such a tiresome indulgence at the best of times, in any case, und so weiter.

As I recall, this was an attempt to write an absolutely flat poem, with no dramatic element to be detected anywhere, whether with a fine-tooth comb, a microscope, or a sixth sense.

There was a tiny fire-escape platform outside the kitchen window of the flat. By clambering up over the sink, I could squeeze myself out onto that platform. And once there, spend hours at a time severely annotating the view out over the rooftops.

Then, the unflagging exploration of the phenomenology of perception seemed the essential aim, the ultimate goal for which one went on living.